47 pages • 1 hour read
Henry MillerTropic of Cancer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1934A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Food
Food has both literal and symbolic resonances throughout Tropic of Cancer. As a motif, it shapes Henry’s depiction of his life in bohemian Paris, for the availability of food indicates whether or how well he is employed and provides opportunities to interact socially with his friends and lovers. In a symbolic sense, it grants him a philosophical lens through to contemplate writing, sex, and the value of material experiences.
Henry quite simply loves food, especially when he does not have it. He writes, “Food is one of the things I enjoy tremendously” (4) and claims, “I not only think about food all day, but I dream about it at night” (69). At various points throughout the text, he is willing to do almost anything for a meal, even an unappetizing one. When living with Nanantatee, for example, he says, “Bad or food what difference? Food! That’s all that matters” (79). However, he sees equal value in the physical sensations that accompany starvation. When he attends the concert at the Salle Gaveau on a very empty stomach, his awareness is noticeably heightened, as he proves with the assertion, “My mind is curiously alert […] as though my skull had a thousand mirrors inside it. My nerves are taut, vibrant!” (74). In this moment, the lack of food becomes all that matters, to such a degree that he loses all connection to time and space.
Food also mediates many of Henry’s relationships, providing a method of exchange through which he can form social bonds and increase his ability as a storyteller. Early in the novel, he asks various acquaintances to each provide him with one meal a week, and this plan works temporarily. During these meals, he provides his hosts with lively conversation and offers long monologues in which he elaborates on his personal philosophy. He also compares writers and artists directly to food, drawing a parallel between different kinds of nourishment, saying, “Mallarmé sounds like a sirloin steak, Victor Hugo like foie de veau […] we need good titles. We need meat—slices and slices of meat” (30, 39). By blurring the boundaries between food and words, the novel elevates everyday acts of consumption to a symbolic plane, ultimately suggesting that we must “eat” words along with food in order to develop intellectually and spiritually.
The Spinning Wheel
In Henry’s personal philosophy, images of spinning wheels, along with other types of circles and spirals, symbolize movement and eternity. While it is unclear whether the center of a spinning wheel, circle, or spiral is a good place to be—Henry contradicts himself on this—he certainly revels in his sense that the world will never end, even after it dies. For example, he writes, “I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end” (258). He believes that immersion in what he calls “the great circuit toward death and dissolution” (258) will finally unite all possible timelines into one beautiful, eternal moment. This sense of circularity and flow is embodied in the spinning wheel, which first appears during a conversation with the disciple of Gandhi and which has a spiritual resonance for practicing Hindus. Reiterating the image of the wheel in a more abstract sense, several narrative cycles occur throughout the novel, including Henry’s own return to Paris from Dijon, after which time his life was “just like it used to be again” (291). However, he does meditate on the negative aspect of spinning and revolving, and in an extended reflection toward the end of the novel, he writes, “Inner-outer, a constant flux, a shedding of skins, a turning inside out. You drift around like that for years and years, until you find yourself in the dead center, and there you slowly rot” (287). In other words, like many of his declarations about philosophical conceits, he is not necessarily consistent; however, the frequent appearance of spinning wheels does highlight the importance of circular movement in his imaginative world.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a popular German poet, playwright, and essayist most famous for his tragic drama Faust and his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe is associated with both German Romanticism, an aesthetic movement that emphasized subjective emotional experiences, and Neoclassicism, which focused on the value of balance, harmony, and reason. One of the most influential writers in modern Europe, Goethe has been read and taught widely since his death: He is thus typically considered an “establishment” figure. He is one of many authors referenced in Tropic of Cancer, but the solidly anti-establishment Miller utilizes him as a contrast to the chaotic and subversive ideology of destruction that he is attempting to articulate throughout the text.
The highly traditional Dijon school where Henry briefly teaches makes it a point to celebrate either the death or the birth of Goethe, and this event is one of the last trials that Henry endures there before escaping to Paris. The fact that he cannot remember which occasion the “idiotic affair” (277) celebrates is perhaps the most telling detail; in the figure of Goethe, life and death are so similar that they essentially cancel each other out. The celebration gives Henry a feeling of “abysmal futility,” (277) especially as it forces him to reflect on the ways in which the French state, uses the school to “bend the minds of the young” (278). After he returns to Paris and moves in with Carl, Henry hears about Goethe yet again. He learns that Carl had recently had sex with a 15-year-old girl whose parents arrived in a rage to take her home; the only thing that “saved” Carl was his copy of Faust, which the girl’s father took to indicate a level of intellectual seriousness on Carl’s part. In both of these instances, Goethe’s work denotes a bland bourgeois respectability that Miller found aesthetically distasteful and thematically worthless: It is associated with forms of limitation and control, including the nation-state and the nuclear family, and thus it represents the kind of philosophy that should be left in the past.
